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Abstract

China’s foreign policy is increasingly perceived as assertive within international relations scholarship, with quintessentially realist perceptions of China’s economic development conceptualising China’s rise as evidence of the emergence of a new era of great-power competition, in which China’s sacrosanct sovereignty approach and material capabilities growth increasingly contributes to the destabilisation of the Indo-Pacific. This study undertook a discourse analysis of 249 news items from four prominent East Asian English-language newspapers in order to deconstruct realism’s deterministic, positivist, perceptions of the implications of China’s rise. Newspaper items relating to Chinese foreign policy in Hong Kong in June 2019, in light of the emergence of a contentious Extradition Bill that drew mass protest, and Taiwan in September 2020, which saw a perceptible spike in Chinese air force activity in its airspace, were analysed in order to examine the discursive construction of Chinese foreign policy and the extent to which Chinese foreign policy was perceived as assertive and as a feature of China-US structural competition. Within the discourses presented in the newspaper reporting Chinese assertiveness was widely represented, with an ideological assertiveness recognised in Hong Kong, and a material Chinese assertiveness recognised in Taiwan, framed within a deterministic China-US structural competition dynamic.

Course: International Relations - MA - P2929FTD

Date Deposited: 2022-08-18

URI/permalink: https://library.port.ac.uk/dissert/dis14001.html